Global Reflections

Baby Bites. When we first arrived here, our sponsor’s daughters filled a bag with items specifically for Alexa. It included a couple of packs of Kraft Easy Mac, some jam, and a few other items. The easy mac benefitted all of us, as it became my backup side dish when I messed up the rice the first time I tried to cook dinner here. But by far, the jewel of the bunch was a snack I’d never heard of, designed for infants aged 6 months and up: Baby Bites. To me, they have no taste at all. Alexa, however, loves them. She eats these thin, oblong, rice husk wafers like I’d eat M&Ms. She recognizes the packaging, both the box and the 2-wafers-inside plastic, and when she sees them, she starts whining and pointing, and if she doesn’t get one immediately, she goes into full tantrum mode. I’m just glad she’s chosen to obsess over a relatively inexpensive semi-local option rather than deciding on the Gerber snacks that also are available, or insisting on her Cheerios, which I haven’t seen here at all.

Damage. My mugs weren’t the only things that arrived damaged. By far, the most heartbreaking was the mugs. The most expensive was a metal trash can, which was dented up something awful, and the foot pedal wasn’t just broken but was missing altogether, not even in the box. The most annoying on a daily basis was the coffee maker, on which a small plastic piece is broken. The piece is one of two that can be used to lift the lid, and it just so happens that it’s the one I naturally try to use most often. Also damaged was a wood cutting board frame, the kind that has a shallow indentation in the top for a plastic interchangeable cutting surface, with a slot underneath to hold several plastic surfaces so you can have one for beef, one for fish, one for veggies, one for bread, and so on. Jeff had to push and press the frame back out so that the plastic pieces would fit into their slot. And the digital food scale apparently endured more than its tolerated 5lb of pressure for too long and won’t work at all anymore; maybe I should have taken the battery out of that before we shipped it. All in all, about half of the things in that box that could be broken were broken. (It’s hard to damage clothing, and the shoes were okay, too, although the boxes were torn up. The small TV, the alabaster piece, the knife set, the ceramic trash can, and the Tupperware-type containers all were unharmed.) I know it’s just stuff, and it doesn’t matter in the big picture. But it does make me angry, and it makes me worry about the rest of our stuff—most especially the rest of the alabaster and the framed papyrus paintings. I’ve been praying for peace, for a relief from the anxiety, but it’s hard. Apparently my stuff means a lot more to me than it really should.

Stripping my diapers.Many of you know that we use cloth diapers with Alexa. One thing that often happens with cloth diapers is that detergent builds up in them, causing them to develop a really nasty smell as soon as they’re soiled—even with urine, not just with poop, although normally I barely smell even a poopy diaper when she’s in cloth—and, in the worst cases, causing them to wick moisture away from the absorbent layer altogether, keeping it trapped against the baby’s skin until it starts to leak. When this problem happens, you strip the diapers. The most common method I’ve heard of involves washing them with a small amount of original Dawn dish detergent, then rinsing them thoroughly. In a year of using them, I’ve never had to strip them. So it didn’t even occur to me to bring some Dawn with me when we moved to Cambodia. Now, apparently the water is harder here or something, because my nose is alerting me that we have a problem with Alexa’s diapers. And Dawn is not available here. I can’t even get it through the APO, because it’s liquid. I can order it from the commissary in Bangkok, but the next shipment from them won’t arrive until late November. If we make a trip to Bangkok for any reason, we can pick some up, but we have no plans to go there. If it comes down to it, a missionary I met—the sister of an awesome doula whose blog I read—has some, and she’s offered to give me what I need. But I hate to take something from her that can’t be replaced, especially when I do have access to it that she doesn’t have, through the Bangkok commissary (it’s against the rules even to give away their products, so I couldn’t even replace what I’d used). So I think I’m going to try the least efficient method first, which is just rinsing them, without any detergent, in cycle after cycle of hot water. It’s going to be a multiday project, and it may not even work. I’ll probably keep Alexa in disposables until I do it, though, because she’s been getting fairly severe diaper rash, presumably from the cloth diapers needing to be stripped. And I don’t want to keep her in disposables, especially not since they’re so expensive here. So I need to get those diapers done … I guess I can always start today, now that my other laundry is out of the wash and in the dryer.

Alexa is becoming a girly girl. She’s always loved for me to brush her hair, even when she didn’t have any. Now she enjoys brushing her own hair—and mine, too!—although she doesn’t always understand which side of the hairbrush she should be using. The icing on the cake is what I discovered just today:  how to get her to sit still for fingernail trimming: tell her that I’m giving her a manicure and making her fingernails “pretty.” At least it worked this time; we’ll see if it works next time. I’ve also started letting her pick out her clothes most days—I have her clothes folded together in matching sets, with short and pant sets (along with the one-piece outfits) in one drawer, dresses in another drawer, and separates in a third. I just open the drawer that contains whatever type of clothes I want her to wear and let her point at her choice. (If we’re doing separates, I pick the pants and then hold up two shirts for her to choose between.) How is that relevant to the girly girl idea? Three-quarters of the time that the choice is available, she chooses one of her very few pink options. Jeff and I are not fans of pink, to put it mildly, so almost all of her pink clothes are gifts* or hand-me-downs. And she chooses them. Instead of the nice greens, blues, and purples we prefer. Sigh. Maybe she’ll grow out of it, in about ten years? *Note to our families: No, this information should not be taken as a reason to buy her more pink clothes! We’ll buy them for her when she asks/points during the shopping.

I’ve never really hired household help before. Sure, I had a part-time maid in Egypt, but I never actually went through “the hiring process” with her. She started working for friends, taking care of their cats while they were away, at the recommendation of their full-time maid. Then, on the recommendation of those friends and their maid, she started working part-time for another friend. Add that friend’s recommendation, and she started working part-time for another friend. Then I became pregnant, had some difficulty, went on bed rest, and needed someone to clean my house now. So we hired her, after meeting her once or twice when she was working for friends, without even an interview other than a quick phone conversation: "When can you come? (Thursday mornings) We'll pay you $X (as you like, Ma'am)." She worked out great for us, and when we left Egypt, another friend who had just arrived hired her solely on the basis of our recommendation. Cycle completed.

No such cycle here in Cambodia. Sure, one embassy contact recommended her cook (who works from well before dawn until mid-morning for her) as our afternoon housekeeper and babysitter. But her cook, who in most respects sounded like she was sent from Heaven above, is going to be taking some significant time off early next year for childbirth. Now, I hate the idea of discriminating against pregnant women—but at the same time, I know that (1) I don’t want to pay for maternity leave for someone I just hired (if she’d been working for me and then become pregnant, it would be different because I’d have a relationship with her); (2) I don’t want to become dependent on someone and then have to do without, especially the babysitting functions if I’m taking language classes; (3) I can’t afford to give her paid time off and hire someone else to replace her at the same time; and (4) with Alexa still in “I need Mommy and only Mommy and sometimes Daddy” mode, I certainly don’t want to get her used to someone, have that person leave (being temporarily replaced or not), and then have her get used to that someone (or someone else) all over again. So, however not politically correct our decision was, Jeff and I decided to pass on this woman, however perfect she sounded in other ways.

But that left me without any recommendations from friends, as I really don’t know anyone here. And then, just to make it fun, we found out that the Khmer language class that I really wanted to take was starting—it started Tuesday, after we found out Friday! I had no babysitter, because I was counting on my eventual housekeeper to be a sometimes-babysitter when necessary. I had not expected the class to start for at least another couple of weeks, and I was caught completely unprepared.To make matters worse, even if I found and hired someone immediately, I knew that she couldn’t start working until the Regional Security Office had completed a background check on her and cleared her to be in my home unescorted. I have no idea how long that process takes here—to a large degree, it depends on how organized and responsive the local police force is, as our investigators have to get any pertinent records from them.

So the search was on! I quickly posted an ad on the Cambodia Parents Network (CPN)  group on Yahoo. I shot off an email to the embassy’s CLO (Community Liaison Office) to ask if they had any leads for me, even for just a temporary solution, like a family with kids Alexa’s age who wouldn’t mind if she joined their kids for a couple of afternoons a week until we hired someone. I received an almost immediate reply that the CLO would check her sources and get back to me.

Then I saw an ad on CPN that someone’s part time housekeeper was looking for afternoon work. She spoke English, cleaned well, could cook, and did some babysitting. She sounded like a gift from God just for me! Even though she wouldn’t be RSO-cleared already, I figured if I hired her long-term, I could come up with a temporary solution until she got her clearance. I called her and set up an interview for Saturday morning. Then I set to work, looking online for what exactly I should be asking a potential housekeeper during an interview.

After discarding most of the suggested questions (applicable to hotel maids more than privately employed housekeepers) and adding a few from “questions to ask your potential nanny” sites, I developed a list that I thought would give us all the information we needed to make a decision. Not that I needed any more than I already had, though, right? I mean, she cleans, cooks, cares for kids, and speaks English. And she’s available in the afternoons, when I need someone.Surely this was the woman!

She arrived 5 minutes early for her interview (“Perfect interview protocol!” I whispered excitedly to Jeff as I peeked out the window and saw the guard letting her in the gate), dressed appropriately in jeans and a nice shirt. She approached the door, took off her shoes, and entered. She seemed nervous, which was understandable. And the conversation started.

I told her what we were looking for, what her responsibilities would be, and what we would pay. Then I started asking questions. And asking them again, phrased differently. And again, phrased in yet another way, and more slowly this time. Then Jeff tried. Twice. We finally pieced together what we believed was a reasonable approximation of her job history. It was not helped by the lack of resume or letters of reference, although her first employer, for whom she’d worked for two years before the employer left Cambodia, had recently returned, and she promised us their phone number once she’d had lunch with them that day. Then we moved on to the more specific questions, which she answered mostly the way we wanted her to, but … again, only after much rephrasing and repeating.

After she left, it didn’t take Jeff and me long to agree: we’d keep looking. I did email the person who had originally posted the ad, and received a more detailed, glowing recommendation. I’m sure she would have done the work well, and I’m sure she’s a sweet girl. But I need to be able to communicate effectively with my housekeeper. And come to think of it, we never did get that phone number she promised us. So we kept looking.

The next morning, we received a phone call from a Cambodian woman who had seen my ad on CPN. She agreed to come in that afternoon for an interview.

I can’t say exactly what gave me pause about this woman. Jeff was all for hiring her. She had experience as a house cleaner and as a nanny. Her English was excellent. She had written recommendations (although, come to think of it, the one I emailed for confirmation never replied). I just had a hesitancy about her. Maybe it was that, after working as a nanny, she’d worked as a dealer at a casino and then as a translator for a company that recently went out of business, putting her back in the employment market. Jeff said that she probably wanted to go back to domestic employment because if she got on with an embassy family, she’d likely be set for many years, but I disagree. I think she left this line of work for a reason, and I think she’d leave it again. And, honestly, I didn’t like that every question she asked us had to do with money and holiday/vacation time. So we agreed that she was the one if no one else better came along quickly, but that I’d keep looking in the meantime.

On Monday, I received a response from the CLO. The housekeeper/cook/shopper of someone who’d had to curtail for medical reasons was still available. She forwarded me the recommendation. This woman sounded very good, but not perfect. She cleans, cooks, shops, and keeps good records of her expenditures so you can see she isn’t cheating you. She has good English. Because she’d worked for an embassy family, I assumed she had RSO clearance already. But she prefers a family with no children, or older children. I thought, maybe, even if she doesn’t want to work for us permanently because Alexa is so young, maybe she’d be willing to work for us temporarily, or even just babysit temporarily, until we can hire someone else.

I shot off an email to her previous employer, asking for her contact information. I didn’t expect a reply until the next day, because of the time difference, but I received one in less than an hour. The glowing recommendation continued. He explained that she didn’t want to work with young children because she has another job, one that requires her to go in only as needed, for short times, and if she’s caring for young children, she can’t go. Her arrangement with him was that she could go to her other job as needed during the day, so long as she did all of the work he needed, too. That sounded reasonable, and made me more comfortable with asking her to babysit for short times—the problem wasn’t that she doesn’t like children, and since I don’t want a full time nanny, the risk to her other job wouldn’t be as great. I called her and set up an interview for that evening.

When she came in, I almost immediately felt comfortable with her. Her English is excellent, although she did ask me to slow down a little so she could understand me better. She explained about her other job, apparently taking fingerprints for one of the Cambodian government ministries on an as-needed basis. She gets paid, but it isn’t enough to support her family, although I can see why she wouldn’t want to let it go, as she’s in a line of work without a great deal of long-term stability. She did ask about time off, but she was quick to explain that it was only because she has a 5-year-old son, and an elderly mother, and if one of them needs to go to the doctor, there isn’t anyone else who can take them. I explained what Jeff and I already had decided about paid holidays, vacation days, and sick leave, and she seemed happy with it. She was happy with the salary we were offering, although she did ask to be paid monthly instead of weekly, so she wouldn’t spend it all too fast. She was upfront about what she could and couldn't do, what she had experience doing and what she'd never done before. When it came right down to it, I liked her and felt comfortable with the idea of having her in my home.

We hired her on the spot. Jeff had discovered that she didn’t have RSO clearance, as we’d assumed, so we are waiting for that before she actually starts work. (Alexa has gone to two Khmer classes with me and has been less of a distraction than I feared. Our teacher told us yesterday that she looks like a doll.) It turns out that although she’s worked for two previous embassy families, the previous RSO didn’t keep as careful records as the current RSO does, so even though her name was submitted and approved, there aren’t any records. The current RSO had to start from scratch with her investigation. But we’re hoping she’ll be able to start next week.

And then we’ll see how good—or bad—my instincts are when it comes to hiring help.

More accurately, I need a SIM card; I have an unlocked phone.

I don’t have a Cambodian SIM card yet because foreigners must have their passport in order to get one; the person who sells it to you must make a copy of the identification page and of the page that has your Cambodian visa. I have my tourist passport, but my tourist passport has no Cambodian visa in it—no visa at all, actually, as I’ve never used it. My diplomatic passport, which has the visa, currently is in the hands of the Cambodian government, as they process my application for a diplomatic identification card. I can’t get a phone until I get that passport back.

And I need a functional mobile phone.

I don’t know about you, but for several years now, I’ve felt strange when I’ve been out and about and realized that I had forgotten my phone, or the battery was dangerously low, or anything else made it inaccessible or unusable for me. After many years of resisting, of insisting that I didn’t need one, I received one—I didn’t buy it; Jeff bought it for me so that I could call him without worrying about long distance charges (we lived in separate states at the time, and although we were only dating, it was pretty obvious that we would marry). After just a few weeks of carrying it with me, I had developed a psychological dependence on it, even though I rarely used it.

When we went overseas, my mobile phone became even more of a psychological security blanket. Imagine being in a country that isn’t your own, where the people speak a language that you can’t understand, where the culture couldn’t be more alien to you if it had descended from Mars itself. Now add in the relatively high probability of a traffic accident, or of you becoming lost, and the realization that, should you need help, there is only one place that you know, without any doubt, someone will understand you and help you. You even know the phone number by heart. But if you don’t have a phone, that isn’t particularly useful. You’re on your own, unable to contact anyone. Unable to call the embassy if there’s a problem. Unable to call your driver—who’s supposed to be waiting!—when you’re ready to leave, and you’re standing there searching for him, and he’s nowhere in sight, and you’re being harassed by beggars and vendors, and you have a baby strapped to you, two heavy bags in your hand, your diaper bag—carrying no cash and nothing valuable—over your shoulder, and your credit card and just enough cash to pay your driver in your pocket, but you’re still worried about pickpockets because how will you pay your driver if your cash is stolen and your card was stolen too so you can’t get any more cash?

Yes, I speak from personal experience. Today’s experience.

I needed to go to the supermarket. Still do, actually, even though I already went, because I don’t have a car and therefore limited my purchases to what I could handle in a tuk-tuk while having Alexa strapped to me and the diaper bag over my shoulder, meaning I have what I need for tonight and tomorrow and that’s it. I hope I have what I need for tonight and tomorrow …

Anyway, I needed to go to the supermarket. Jeff had told me that his regular tuk-tuk driver had made it a point to tell him that he was available during the day if I needed to go to the supermarket. And I wanted a driver who knows where everything is, so I don’t have to know yet, because I don’t, and I wanted a driver who could wait for me while I did my shopping so I didn’t have to know how to get home, either, or even if I did know (I did, this time), I wouldn’t have to try to tell him and gesture while holding Alexa and her diaper bag and my groceries. So I wanted Jeff’s driver. So I used the house phone to call Jeff and get his driver’s phone number, and then I used the house phone to call the driver. He agreed to pick me up at 3pm, and then called me back to ask if it was okay to wait until 3:15. Sure, whatever, no problem.

At 3:15, I walked out the gate and was greeted by a tuk-tuk driver who was waiting for me. Now, I’ve seen Jeff’s driver twice, and both times, Jeff interacted with him while I looked around at the scenery. So I’m embarrassed to admit that I wouldn’t recognize Jeff’s driver if he came up and bit me—although I probably would hit him if he came up and bit me. But this guy was waiting for me, and his tuk-tuk looked nice like the one Jeff’s driver has, and when he spoke, I didn’t understand much but I did understand Jeff’s driver’s name—twice, even. And he knew I wanted to go to the supermarket, although he thought I wanted to go to the Lucky that’s close by and I actually wanted to try the one at Soriya Shopping Center. So I thought this was Jeff’s driver. In I got and off we went.

When we arrived at Soriya, I explained that I needed him to wait for me, and that I didn’t have a phone. No problem, he’d wait. I did my shopping. I came out of the shopping center with Alexa, the diaper bag, and two bags of groceries, one of them pretty heavy (canned goods and two different types of vinegar). I had made it a point to look hard at the driver’s face and tuk-tuk, so I’d recognize him. Because he’d be waiting. Problem: Many of the tuk-tuks looked nice like his, and none of the drivers looked like him. Many, however, approached me and offered me a ride. “No, no, my driver is waiting for me.” But … I didn’t see him. One driver almost had me convinced he was my guy—he looked a lot like him, and I didn’t understand what he was saying, but I did understand the name. But then, before we actually approached his tuk-tuk, he asked where I wanted to go, and I said “Home,” and he said “Ok, where?” and I knew he wasn’t my guy. So I sent him on his way and went back to looking for my guy.

When he finally pulled up (I’d waited maybe all of 10 minutes, max, but it felt like hours), I wasn’t sure it was him. I said his name—what I thought was his name—and he said “Yes,” but I wasn’t completely convinced until he said, “You go to Lucky now?” Ah, this is my guy! I explained that I wanted to go home now, and he looked confused, apparently not noticing the two Lucky bags in my hands, but he said “Ok,” and didn’t ask where that was, so it was all good. Into the tuk-tuk I went and off we drove, as I breathed a sigh of relief.

When we arrived at my house, he said, “How you know <driver’s name>?”

Huh?

“<Driver’s name> your husband’s driver, you have a driver?”

After much confusion, I realized what had happened. The driver introduced himself to me when he first met me, not because he hadn’t spoken to me before, but because he’d never even seen me before. Jeff’s driver couldn’t make it, because he needed to be available to pick Jeff up sooner than I'd likely be done, and he sent his friend instead. His friend whose name is the same as his, with the exception that the final consonant is different. I hadn’t heard Jeff’s driver’s name twice in the initial introduction; I’d heard it once, and the friend’s name once, but because I’m still working on understanding the accent here, I didn’t catch the difference.

So I guess I not only need a phone, I need a better ear!

My most recent acquisition is my Egypt cup. I bought it early on during my sojourn in Egypt, much earlier than I intended. I had planned to wait for several months, get a feel for the place, then spend days or even weeks perusing cups, only to finally pick the one that best embodied Egypt and my experiences there. Instead, I visited a shop with a friend after a very short time in Egypt, within the first month. The shop contained handicrafts from all over the country: pottery, clothing, bags, jewelry, even tablecloths. As I perused the pottery, a single cup called to me. It did not seem to be representative of Egypt at all. In my mind, Egypt was pyramids and papyrus, sphinxes and canopic jars. This cup had two peacocks on it. Nevertheless, I couldn’t resist its siren song. I purchased it, thinking that it was just a nice cup, not part of my “special” collection. I’d add my Egypt cup later. I never did. That was my Egypt cup, somehow coming to embody the country for me.

My second most recent acquisition isn’t mine; it belongs to Jeff. It’s a cup I picked up in the States when I was awaiting Alexa’s birth. I intended to give it to him at the hospital after her birth. “New Daddy, get ready to have your world rattled,” it proclaims, amidst its pastel polka dots. Not very masculine, but very Daddy-ish, appropriate for the new father of a baby girl. When Alexa came early, I forgot to take it to the hospital. I forgot all about it for the week Alexa was in the NICU. When she came home, I remembered it, but never at a good time to give it to him. I finally gave it to him three weeks after her birth, as he was packing to return to Egypt without us.

How does this relate to the title of this post? I’m sure you see it coming.

Today was supposed to be a happy day. It started out as a happy day, with the delivery of one of our four boxes of air freight (the other three somehow ended up in Rome; don’t ask because I don’t know how). They’ll come later. But we didn’t expect to receive any of it so soon, so we were happy to see what arrived. The happiness lasted until the bottom of the box. And then …

Who would pack coffee cups underneath a heavy ceramic trash can? Who would be so stupid?*

The two cups pictured above survived the trip. Others didn’t.

A cup, picked up at the airport near my hometown, commemorating the home of my heart. Representing my memories of childhood, of growing up in a small town where everyone knows you, or at least knows who your parents are; where your neighbor doesn’t think twice about calling your mom because a boy came over while she was at work; where your little brother can take his bike and ride all over town without a curfew and without fear (but the girls in the family always were required to stay on our street).  The memories remain. The cup is gone. I should be able to replace it. Last time I was in that airport, they still had the mugs. Ten dollars, I think.

A simple cup, handmade by an artist in West Virginia. Jeff humored me in my search for it, scouring shops and finally following an ad to the artist’s showroom: Gauley River Pottery. The hours we spent in the showroom, searching for just the right shape before settling on the small mug in Gauley Green, although I'd swear mine was bigger than the advertised 3x4 inches, and had more of a curve to it. Only twenty dollars to order a new one online. But will I? Even if it looked exactly the same, could it really replace the one we picked out to represent our honeymoon? Maybe, if I don’t think about the fact that it’s version 2.0, rather than the first one, now broken beyond repair. I know; I tried to piece it back together and couldn’t.

The cup that started it all. A graduation gift from a college professor for whom I did research, specially handmade by one of the art professors. Carried with me to graduate school, where it was used every single day. Embodying the memories of times in the lab at undergrad, joking with the professor and with my lab mates. With me through three years of hard work in grad school; capturing my first experience living on my own, without so much as a roommate. Representing my academic, social, and personal growth through some of my most formative years. Smashed beyond recognition. Irreplaceable. Gone forever.

We were told before we moved to Egypt not to take anything with us that couldn’t be replaced. We listened. We left behind the signature portrait from our wedding, our framed diplomas, my wedding dress. We even left behind the stuffed animals of our childhoods. All safely nestled in a storage unit somewhere in Maryland. But when it came to my coffee mugs, I drew the line. The joy in having them isn’t havingthem. It’s using them, seeing them and allowing the memories and associations to flood my mind. It was a calculated risk.

I lost.

*One of the cardinal rules of having professional movers is to watch them carefully, both to ensure that nothing goes missing and to ensure that nothing like this happens. We watched them. Unfortunately, due to unusual circumstances that I will not go into, our air freight had to be repacked in transit, while not under our supervision.

Written Tuesday, 18 October 2011.

Update Saturday, 22 October 2011: Apparently Jeff's "New Daddy" mug didn't escape unscathed, either. It has a hairline fracture in it, just enough to let the coffee ooze out, but not enough to be noticed under casual inspection. *Sigh.*

Central Market

We had an unexpected opportunity today to visit Central Market, one of the large mostly open-air shopping areas in Phnom Penh. Our sponsor was taking her daughter there to buy supplies for an upcoming birthday party, and she invited us to tag along. We gratefully accepted the offer and headed out for an afternoon—okay, a couple of hours—of playing tourist while maybe learning something useful about where to do some shopping.

Jewelry vendors under the dome

Central Market was not really what I expected. I think I had in mind something more like the Khan el Khalili in Cairo, which was very much geared toward tourists. There were areas of it where actual Egyptians shopped for useful or necessary items, but the areas nearest the major roads were filled with shops that catered to westerners, selling kitschy pyramids and perfume bottles and carved camels, as well as the ever-popular scarves and wooden inlay boxes. So for Central Market, I had visions of kitschy temple models and Buddhas and who knows what else, plus the obligatory scarves and t-shirts. I was way off, although there was a little of what I expected.

Fresh food

Central Market, known in Khmer as Psar Thmay (literally “New Market”), contains vendors that sell just about anything you can think of—the vast majority of it useful. I saw more clothing booths than I care to remember, selling children’s clothes, casual and dressy clothes for both men and women, and even underwear and bras (and yes, the obligatory scarves and t-shirts, too). There were shoe vendors, electronics vendors, lots of jewelry vendors. A whole row of stalls sold fresh flowers, and an entire section was dedicated to fresh foods, including fruits, spices, and fish still swimming around in small tanks. That isn’t to say that there weren’t stalls dedicated to less pragmatic goods: we also saw paintings, Buddha figures, purses, wall hangings, even one stall of wigs.

One of the main entrances

The market itself is housed in and around a bright yellow colonial-style building. The entire complex takes up a whole city block, from what I could tell. Stalls lined the sidewalks facing the streets, and more stalls were set up inside a warren of small paths that wove throughout the block. There seemed to be four main entrances to the building itself, one on each side of the block. A wide pathway, lined with stalls on both sides, led to each entrance. The center part of the building—a dome—was filled with jewelry vendors. Four arms branched out from the dome, extending toward the corners of the city block, and these sections contained all sorts of vendors, mostly clothing and electronics, at least in the two arms that we investigated.

Our purchases

We did not intend to make any purchases today; we went mostly to see the place and learn what was available, not to buy anything unless we happened upon something that we knew we needed. However, I re-learned a valuable lesson that apparently I forgot during my summer in the States: if you stop too long to look at something, you really are signaling an intention to buy. I stopped to look at some cute wall hangings that I thought may look nice in Alexa’s room or in the playroom once we get it set up. I paused too long, then compounded my error by calling Jeff over to look. The lady working the booth promptly unhooked the hangings from their peg and handed them to me—all twenty or more of them. It was catch them or let them all fall onto the pavement. I tried to tell her that we were just looking today, just getting ideas, but she either didn’t understand or, equally likely, chose not to understand. I made my third mistake by asking her how much they cost, so I would know when we came back. She started out at $5 each. I thanked her for the information and repeated that we were just looking today. Suddenly, for me, there was a “special price”—$4 each. And a bag containing another 20 or 25 wall hangings appeared out of thin air and was dumped on the table she’d just set up for that very purpose. As I continued to tell her that we were just looking today, the price dropped all the way to $2 each, and Jeff announced that we should go ahead and buy a couple. We bought five. As we left, Jeff said quietly to me, “That’s the most effective bargaining I never meant to do.” He was right. I do wonder, if we’d stuck with our original intentions just a little while longer, if the price would have dropped all the way to $1 each, or even to two for a dollar.

After our purchase, we walked around a little longer, but we didn’t want to stay very long. Alexa was sleepy when we left the house and fell asleep mere moments after we arrived at the market. It was a pleasant day, temperature-wise, but having a sleeping baby pressed to your body makes it get real hot real quick. Jeff bore the brunt of that discomfort, as I had brought the camera along and, most of the time, was either snapping pictures or holding it tightly in my hand to make sure the pickpockets had no chance at it. We made a quick trip across the street to try to get a SIM card for my mobile phone—no luck, as they have to make a photocopy of my passport and visa, and my diplomatic passport (which contains the visa) is with the Cambodian government right now so they can process my diplomatic ID. After that unsuccessful foray into the mobile phone shop, we called our sponsor to see how she was doing on her shopping. She had just purchased a pair of sunglasses that wouldn’t be ready for her for another 30 minutes (maybe one day I’ll understand what the delay was all about), so we decided to just take a tuk-tuk home.

All in all, it was a successful trip. I’m not at all nervous about going there again on my own, although I’d prefer to have an idea of what things should cost so I won’t be going into my deliberate negotiations blind. We didn’t intend to, but we did end up picking up some nice decorative items that also should help deaden the echoes in our house—tile floors with relatively small area rugs, plus extremely high ceilings, with nothing on the walls yet means that this place is an echo chamber right now. And we got out and saw some more of the city, rather than staying cooped up inside as is our habit on Jeff’s days off. We even arrived back home before the rain started. Yes, I’d call it successful on all fronts.